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  In the markets, cardboard boxes are flattened and rolled into tight cylinders, then bound with string to make lightweight stools. Blacksmiths repurpose discarded car radiators to make a more efficient bellows. No effort is spared to extract a day’s pay from the resources at hand. On the slopes of Mount Mabu, a mountain in northern Mozambique where British biologists have identified dozens of previously unknown species of birds, plants, and reptiles since 2005, I met a man who had just felled a tree well over a hundred feet tall, its trunk as large as the pylons that support a highway overpass.35 It had taken two days, but he had extracted several gallons of wild honey from a hive high in the canopy, enough to fill a jerrican and make the long trip to town by bicycle. The payoff would be $40. How much, I wondered, would the tree be worth if only he had a means to mill the timber and sell that too? Or else, I thought, what could the man have done with a long ladder or a climbing rope?

  I’ve tried to explore the lives of people in Mozambique to uncover broader challenges to twenty-first-century development throughout Africa: Can you fix a refugee system that abets human trafficking? Can you move beyond the specter of violence when a warlord leads the political opposition? Bookended by Ghana in 1957 and Zimbabwe in 1980, more than fifty countries in sub-Saharan Africa gained independence in a period of less than twenty-five years. Now, half a century into the era of African independence, each of these nations is struggling to forge a new path beyond a shared history of colonialism, war, and underdevelopment, to shore up fragile institutions that have yet to supplant the power of the informal. Along the way, Azagaia’s observations still ring true: the see-and-saw of daily life happens on the margins.

  The stories in this book were reported primarily over the course of two trips to Mozambique: the first nearly a year, from March 2011 to February 2012, and the second for the month of February 2016. Most interviews were conducted in Portuguese. I have tried to note the exceptions, particularly in instances where I relied on translations from people who are present in the stories themselves.

  I regret that this has turned out to be a book that leans heavily toward the voices and experiences of men. In part, that’s a feature of the stories I zeroed in on: one chapter focuses on a group of migrants made up almost entirely of men, another focuses on the mostly male entourage of a militia leader turned politician. At times, the slant of my reporting was exacerbated by realities on the ground. Where I have written about people in positions of power, for instance, they are far more likely to be men than women, something that is broadly true across Mozambican society. The few interviews with women that are featured here sometimes arose out of my insistence that men not do all the talking. Nevertheless, as men’s voices surfaced in the course of my travels, I wish I had done more to address the imbalance.

  The book also bears the marks of my particular experience in other ways: the bulk of the stories here took place in the four of Mozambique’s ten provinces where I spent the most time. And, had I set out to write this book again today, I might have included chapters on both climate change and HIV/AIDS, two important social problems that are not much discussed.

  Azagaia first came to prominence in 2008, when, during proceedings for World Press Freedom Week, hosted in Maputo, prosecutors from the attorney general’s office summoned him to explain the lyrics to a song called “People in Power.”

  With so many foreign journalists crowded into cafés and conference rooms in the capital, the prosecutors didn’t detain Azagaia or formally charge him with a crime. But they did press him with questions about the song for nearly two hours: Did he write it himself? Why? Didn’t he think it could provoke people to violence?

  The song was written as a response to riots that had swept through Maputo a month earlier, when the government’s announcement of fare hikes for public transit became a proxy for a broad array of grievances: corruption, unemployment, the price of flour, the price of rent.

  Senhor presidente, largaste o luxo do teu palácio

  Finalmente te apercebeste que a vida aqui não está fácil . . .

  Se a policia é violenta

  Respondemos com violência

  Muda a causa pra mudares a consequência . . .

  Baixa a tarifa do transporte ou sobe o salário mínimo

  Xeeeeeeeee . . . isso é o que deves fazer no mínimo

  À não ser que queiras fogo nas bombas de gasolina

  Assaltos a padarias, ministérios, imagina

  Destruir os vossos bancos comerciais, a vossa mina

  Governação irracional parece que contamina.

  “Mr. President, you’ve left the luxury of your palace / And finally realized life here isn’t easy,” Azagaia cries in the second verse.

  If the police are violent

  We’ll respond with violence

  If you want to change the consequence, then you should change the cause . . .

  Lower the cost of bus fare or raise the minimum wage

  Maaaaaann—That’s the least you should do

  Unless, of course, you want fire at your gas stations

  Riots outside the bakeries and in front of government ministries, just imagine

  We’ll destroy your banks and mines

  It looks like bad governance is contagious.

  Over the course of a few weeks, “People in Power” had become a breakout hit, earning steady radio play around Maputo. It offered a clear moral framework for the chaos that had overtaken the capital with burning tires and barricaded streets, and it made Azagaia a prominent social critic. His interrogation made waves too. The message for disc jockeys, conveyed informally and indirectly, was clear enough: Azagaia has only become more famous in the years since, but you don’t hear him on the radio much at all.

  A few months after Azagaia’s talk at the university, I went to see Ismael Mamudo, director of the archives at Rádio Moçambique, the government radio network, to ask whether Azagaia’s music was in fact censored. “We don’t prohibit it, but we avoid playing it,” he said with a laugh. “No one’s going to put a notice on the wall. If you are going to ban something, you have to put up a notice.” Instead, it was a more informal arrangement, something like censorship by inference. “The DJs are afraid. They’ll never play a thing like that because someone could ask, ‘Why did you play that?’”

  I asked how it is that people know that Azagaia can’t be played if it is never declared outright. “We ourselves ask that question. People who work here. I wonder that myself,” Mamudo said, leaning back in his chair.

  He was at pains to explain how much he liked Azagaia. “There’s no musician out there who has more courage,” he said. Mamudo had been to Azagaia concerts and said he had copies of his CDs. “Azagaia’s message is very strong. I’ve seen him play, and it’s strong. When you hear him in concert, you can see people looking around at one another—” Mamudo mimed uneasy concertgoers looking around incredulously. “Sometimes the truth hurts.” He called Azagaia’s way of speaking verdade no ângulo—the sharp corner of the truth. “Have you ever heard of Fela Kuti?” he asked me, referring to the Nigerian bandleader and political firebrand. “That’s more or less what we have on our hands here with this young man.”

  “Besides,” Mamudo said after a while, “there’s lots of music we can’t play.” He gestured at a wall of shelves filled with eight-inch magnetic tape reels. “You know, music from the luta armada”—the armed struggle against the Portuguese, when Frelimo was at its most idealistic.

  “Our first president, he had a way of speaking,” Mamudo went on. “If he said there was no corruption in this country, he didn’t tolerate it. And there wasn’t: people who were corrupt lost their jobs. Many of those songs are blueprints, plans for the country that didn’t come to pass. There are things he wanted to happen for the people—health care, good education, all the land belongs to the people—that is not like the way that things are happening now.

  “[Azagaia’s] songs contradict a little bit. They are truths from another time. But they�
��re still true.”

  1

  Small-Town Hustle

  ZAMBEZIA

  A vida aqui é um jogo de xadrez. . . . O cavalo move assim, o bispo move assim. . . . Só que a meio do jogo as regras mudam. Comeu-te um peão porque o cavalo passou a mover-se diferente.

  Life here is like a chess game. . . . The knight moves like this, the bishop like that. . . . Except that in the middle of the game the rules change. A peon ate you because the knight started to move differently.

  —MOZAMBICAN DANCER IN MAPUTO1

  By the time Davane Monteiro started selling cassette tapes, in 1997, the CD was already king in much of the world. Cassette sales in the United States peaked at close to 500 million tapes a year in 1988, fell by more than 80 percent in the 1990s, and have only continued to decline in the years since.2

  Not so in Mocuba: as Monteiro remembers it, when he bought his first lot of tapes, the only recorded music to be had there, with a few exceptions, was on a pair of scratchy radio stations, one of which played only gospel. Record players had always been rare. Tape decks were only just making their way into the living rooms of the well-heeled as the economy came back to life after the war. A few people, Monteiro remembers, had Walkmans, but they had to travel a hundred miles to the port of Quelimane to buy new music. So Monteiro went to Quelimane himself and asked the cassette vendors—boys his own age—how to get started. They pointed him to their tio, or uncle, the supplier, and Monteiro returned to Mocuba with a lot of twenty tapes, which he sold from a bench at the market. In three days, he had none left. He went and got another twenty. Then fifty, then one hundred. The business went well. When his supplier went out of town for six months, another man approached him, wanting to do the same business. The man went to Malawi, came back with five hundred tapes, and had Monteiro resell them. The next time, Monteiro went with him.

  They went to Blantyre for cassette tapes, Tanzania to buy shoes, and Zambia to buy capulanas, the printed wrap skirts traditionally worn by women in many African countries. Mozambique’s coastline is close to two thousand miles long, yet plenty of imports come by way of its landlocked neighbors. In Mocuba, you can find sugar, cement, and potatoes, as well as fertilizer, used clothing, shoes, and schoolbags that have come from Malawi, often after passing through Mozambican ports. Along the border, there are communities that sell their maize to traders in Malawi, only to see it trucked back into Mozambique as a Malawian “export.” Often, the remote portions of Mozambique seem cut off from the rest of the country, their economies tributaries of cities somewhere beyond the national boundaries. Sometimes, this is because of shared language and customs, which are more meaningful, locally, than any concept of national identity. Just as often, it is simply a matter of convenience borne of spotty infrastructure and underdeveloped markets—people go to Malawi to buy things they can’t find, or can’t find as cheaply, in Mozambique.

  Monteiro and his tio slept in bus stations and ate in the markets where they bought their merchandise, returning to Mocuba as soon as possible so Monteiro could get back to school. For Monteiro, it was an education in business: what goods packed well, what sold fast, how to negotiate shipping fees with the louts who loaded the buses back toward Mozambique. He picked up snatches of Swahili in Tanzania and learned how to count in English. He describes it now as a “great adventure.”

  Soon, Monteiro struck out on his own, reselling tapes in twenties and thirties to other kids in Mocuba. Since he was making regular trips to Blantyre—the closest city where you could find something like a full-fledged record store—he began to field special requests. He hunted down songs for Mocuba’s restaurant owners and for its nightclubs, the largest of which, the Desportivo, is a colonial athletic club reinvented as a discotheque after the swimming pool was drained in 1975.

  Then he unlocked the power of the radio. One day, a song would play on the radio, Monteiro said, “and the next three days, people came to me looking for that song, not knowing that I was the one who had given it to the radio station. Each weekend, I brought back one or two novidades and gave them to the radio. The next week, I took those tapes back and gave them others.” The radio station began promoting him. Retelling the story, Monteiro wrinkled his nose and put on an announcer’s voice: “‘And if you like this, you can go see our distributor, the one and only Dany Monteiro.’” He burst out laughing. “We sold a lot of Cape Verdian music, Angolan music, Malawian. It was hard to find Mozambican music in those days.”

  It’s a good measure of Mocuba’s distance from the center of the global economy that tape sales there didn’t begin to slacken until the mid-2000s and only collapsed altogether in 2009. “Cassettes have been good to me,” Monteiro said.

  By the time I met Monteiro, two years later, the transition to CDs and MP3s was complete. He was twenty-six and already, it seemed, on his seventh or eighth career. He had sold cigarettes, trucked corn from the country to the city, filmed TV news segments, traded in agricultural equipment, and bought farmland to produce beans and pigeon peas as a cash crop. Monteiro had dabbled in most everything Mocuba’s economy had to offer. But Mocuba is a place where you can never have quite enough work; if you want a job, you have to make one. So he continues to multiply his streams of income. He directs music videos, builds houses and rents them out, produces music for local passado singers. There’s no such thing as too many businesses. It is all simply business.

  For a long time, Monteiro’s base of operations has been a small room on the first floor of a ramshackle hotel and restaurant across from Mocuba’s bus depot. There, midway down a dank hallway, he rents a space the size of walk-in closet that shares a wall with a motorcycle parts stand facing the street. There are no windows and no sign on the door. A Frelimo poster on one wall has been rebranded in support of Monteiro’s business: “Preta Dany Studios,” it reads in black marker. “Number 1 studio in Mocuba.”

  “Preta Dany” is a combination of Monteiro’s eldest daughter’s name, which means “black” in Portuguese, and his own nickname, Dany, but the studio has become so closely associated with the man that most people now simply call him Preta—like his daughter—for short.

  There are narrow wooden benches along each wall, and an acoustic guitar hangs from one corner above a jumble of boxes and microphone stands. The centerpiece is a whirring Dell desktop computer loaded with tens of thousands of MP3s and grainy music videos, vaguely categorized by country and by genre. Duplicates abound. Hardly any of the files are coherently labeled with the artist and track title, yet Preta somehow manages to sift through them with precision, distinguishing instantaneously between file names like “Malawi 01” and “!#~0_Malawi.”

  This is what’s become of all the tapes. Preta no longer has to travel to Malawi for music. Nowadays, he goes no farther than his competitors, in the habit of passing around USB keys full of the latest hits from Maputo and Angola. For a while, the local supply chain for all of these MP3 merchants started with TDM, or Telecomunicações de Moçambique, the state phone and internet utility. Employees there used their access to unlimited bandwidth to pipe in music from around the world, spinning it off in bundles to people like Preta.

  I first visited Preta’s studio well into the evening with a jovial phone credit salesman named Agusto, who referred to Preta admiringly as his “older brother.” Agusto is a large, squarely built man whose gap-toothed smile and complete lack of guile sometimes make him seem more like a young boy. Preta, it turned out, had no blood relationship or even close friendship with Agusto, but had gotten him started as a salesman by buying him his first bundle of scratch cards. The longer I spent with Preta, the more of these stories I heard: There was a corn-milling machine he had passed off to a business partner to thank him for his sweat equity after Preta had recouped his investment, and the farmland he bought for cousins on his mother’s side to grow beans for market. But Preta also had his own “older brothers,” shopkeepers and friends who had come through periodically with loans or advances in a town that had b
een without a bank branch for most of Preta’s life.

  Agusto and I left his post together at dark and meandered through the lamplit alleys of Mocuba’s open-air market to Preta’s studio. The walls still radiated sweltering heat absorbed over the course of the day, like a rock that has been sitting in the sun; a fan hummed feebly in one corner.

  Preta was in the middle of editing a music video advertisement for a local phone credit wholesaler called Afro. In the video, a light-skinned singer with short dreadlocks listed all the things you can get from Afro—cheap phone credit, universal chargers—over a gentle reggae beat. These clips were interspersed with footage of Afro himself standing in front of the store, vigorously beckoning at the audience. The singer had recently won a national competition, Preta said, for “best male voice in Mozambique.” Afro’s hope was that the video would become popular as a song rather than a commercial and go viral, in a sense, on the video CD players of Mocuba’s downtown businesses.

  A middle-aged man in a gray suit stooped to enter the studio and sat in a white plastic chair adjacent to Preta’s desk, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Preta interrupted his work and swiveled to face him.

  “Give me some of that Malawian stuff,” the man said. “What’s it called? The church music.”